Meg,
I'm so sorry for chattering away on your thread -- I'll go put myself in the corner in just a few, I promise
, but you have me thinking about a lot of my past experiences in the dating world.
I remember a long time ago, when I actually was about 32 and on a dating site, a gentleman contacted me who was about 50. He seemed very nice, but his messages would go back and forth between rants about his ex-wife to how much he was looking forward to finding a beautiful young lady to be his new companion. It was glaringly obvious that the pain of his divorce was still very fresh, and I wasn't comfortable with the idea of dating someone who was obviously still extremely attached to his ex-wife. This was a whole lot more intimidating to me than his age.
I had to send him a final message trying to gently explain that I didn't see anything happening between us, and in his reply, he wrote something about what his life used to be, and "now I'm just an old man."
I truly felt sorry for him, and said a prayer, because he obviously had a very broken heart.
I just remember feeling extremely sad for him, that he apparently felt his life was over because, in his view, no (young) woman wanted him.